2025 Outlook: Maschine, Kontrol, and NKS Hardware Partnerships

Subject - Year End Holiday Support

(Mods - Please feel free to break this post off into its own thread if you think that's appropriate)

Dear @Chris_NI:

There is another critical issue that comes up now at every year-end holiday period. This year's (2024 into 2025) was absolutely the worst.

The forum gets loaded down with support requests from new users, such as people who received as Christmas gifts Komplete, Komplete Kontrol, Maschine, or one of the other hardware solutions or partner libraries.

The NI suport team is gone for weeks starting around December 20th, and they're gone through Christmas, New Year's day, and Three King's day, and don't come back from break until after January 6th. This is a carryover from NI's days as a German company, and continues today in its US form.

Then the re-ramping up of people coming back from break is … too slow. Maybe due to people warming up, drying out, getting the kids back to school, or just plain figuring out how to wear shoes again, I don't know. Then there's also NAMM in January. And CES, and who knows what else.

Those of us here in the forum who are not NI team members, we do our best to help our fellow new users; even the new users who have no idea the difference between an audio track and a MIDI sequence. We are happy to help.

But we're not paid for that, and we end up being the shield that gets bloodied by angry customers when the support team doesn't respond (or doesn't respond promptly). Hey, we get it! It's complicated, having a Mac or PC with all this OS software, DAW software, Audio interface bits and bobs, and now the added complexity of having KK now with firmware that needs to be updated (and takes way too long on some computers/setups).

There were also a lot of web store problems. More than a fair number of people came to these forums because they had a problem making a purchase, purchasing the correct product or suite, getting Native Access to work, or just plain getting sound to come out of their new Komplete gift or purchase.

People get NI products as Christmas presents. And then when they have trouble downloading, installing, or using their purchases, they become frustrated. When no NI people respond to support tickets, that's when WE HERE IN THE FORUM have to spend valuable time to weed through the angry "I quit NI" verbiage just to get to a point where we can help our fellow users.

I'm here to suggest that as a business, it may be possible that Native Instruments may have to consider providing some support during the EOY holidays. Because in its current form, it's definitely not working for new users.

Much appreciation is owed to the good members of this forum for doing their best: People like our forum mods @PoorFellow, @PK The DJ, @mykejb, @DunedinDragon, @Uwe303, and @Sunborn, among many others. @Vocalpoint, and several others have also been working hard to provide help.

Copying a few others on this issue, so that they know about this conversation.

@Matthew_NI

@Jeremy_NI (a big Thank You to Jeremy for looking into the forums at various times over the holidays…even during his time off.)

Thank you @Chris_NI, for your attention to this. And yes, I'm going to remind you of this topic as the US Thanksgiving holiday approaches in 2025, because this will not get better without some course of action.